Next week I am going try to fix modular difficulty system.Apparently modular difficulty system doesn't make game that hard and gives too good rewards!

If I'll fix modular difficulty system in time, I will release new Sector Six version next weekend.

When modular difficulty system will be fixed, I will make story mission V, that will be at least 4 times longer than story mission IV! It will also feature boss fight, that will change based on your actions during mission.

In other news, I have finally bought controller!I will start working on controller support after story mission V.

This week I was shaping modular difficulty system!​It took me many hours, but have managed to make mission overview into something I can tolerate.

​Eight icons are modular difficulty system modules or challenges.Enabling them changes image between challenges and mission description.That image is difficulty map, it's a visual representation of modular difficulty system.

The (almost finished) mission overview

Enabling challenges is actually your hero deciding to take more dangerous paths, with anomalies and powerful enemies. Difficulty map shows those dangerous paths.

Here's the updated list of challenges:

Lethal WeaponsMinions will deal 50% more damage

Aberrant ArmourMinions will have 100% more armour

The Manifestations of DestructionYou will encounter dreadnoughts

The Assault of the ModifiedYou will encounter more modified minions

The Rain of FireYou will be bombarded every 10 seconds until you will destroy bombardment station

Risk for RewardEarned parts and experience will be lost if you will fail the mission

The DecisionMission objective count will be increased by 100%

Flow StagnationAbilities will cost 100% more ether during this mission

Some of these challenges can be used more than once.For example, you can use Aberrant Armour to make enemies have 500% more armour!

​After making mission overview, I implemented rewards and began implementing challenges.

I have implemented four of the challenges already, four more to go.

When they will be implemented, I will be testing and balancing modular difficulty system to make sure it can't be exploited too much.

I will also increase power of some abilities!I can now decrease difficulty of base game, those players who will want difficulty will be able to get more than enough of it through modular difficulty system.

When I began working on Sector Six, I didn't knew that it would become this big.

​I didn't knew that Sector Six is going to be in Steam, I didn't knew that it will get so much positive feedback, I didn't knew that one day I will write 50th development blog a.k.a. echo about it.

But it all happened and it's amazing!

So, how did it began?

In 2014, after finishing my first game, I immediately began working on Sector Seven. I had the idea of allowing player to build spaceships out of destructible blocks. Two months later Sector Seven was finished. It was weird, clunky, pretentious shoot 'em up with light RPG elements and many, many problems.

But I glad I made it, because without out it, there would be no Sector Six.

I promised myself that I would make Sector Seven sequel. Later I have decided not to, but then...

One quiet summer morning I woke up with weird images in my mind. It was epic black spaceship silhouettes and I knew they were built out many blocks.

I created new project file, called Shadow Sector the same day. Later I decided to call it Sector Six.

In the beginning, I didn't worked on Sector Six much, I was focusing on my other game, Lur. Just like Sector Seven, it wasn't a good game, but while making it, I got experience, that I needed to make Sector Six.

I have finished Lur on January 2015, redirected my focus on Sector Six and intense development began.

Back then Sector Six was similar to Sector Seven. There was no inventory, blocks were simply bought for currency. Those blocks didn't had any stats and they were destroyed on hit. Lose all blocks and game is over.

Back then I was playing Path of Exile and Torchlight. So another idea hit me. What if blocks had random stats and you could get them by killing enemies? I already knew how to make inventory and generate random loot from Lur, so I decided to give it a try. And it worked!

Oldest Sector Six screenshot I have

When I finally made Sector Six playable, I have uploaded first alpha version. After Sector Seven and Lur I didn't expect anything, so I was surprised when Sector Six received good comments and ratings. I knew that I can improve the game, so positive feedback about the alpha version made me really excited about the future of Sector Six. And I began working on Sector Six like crazy!

With modified enemies in, I can work on modular difficulty system! It should take me one, maybe two weeks to finish and then I'll update the game, hopefully it will happen this month!

After modular difficulty system... Well, there was massive interface update, massive combat update, massive graphical update... Now it's time for massive story update! After modular difficulty system I will be working on story missions. A lot of them!

Now when you fill the inventory, it becomes bigger, that means items will never be lost because there’s not enough space in the inventory!

Filling inventory creates new inventory page. Removing all items from last inventory page, deletes that inventory page. And there’s a limitation – if you want to start new mission, you cannot have more than 3 inventory pages. The inventory is infinite, but your computer’s power is not!

After more than 10 pages created, FPS severely drops when adding the new item to the inventory, this should be even worse for the slower computers.

I could probably optimize inventory system to allow having 100 and more pages without any lag, but I would need to completely rewrite inventory system and I don’t want to do that. It would take a lot of time and 3 inventory pages – that’s 198 slots! – is more than enough, for now.

I wanted to make inventory kind-of-infinite, because the modular difficulty system will reward player with a lot of items at the end of the mission.

Here is the challenges that the modular difficulty system will offer:

Armoured MinionsMinions will have 50% more armour.

Deadly MinionsMinions will deal 25% more damage.

Deadly Encounters​You will have a chance to encounter dreadnoughts.

The Assault of the ModifiedThere will be more modified minions.

The Rain of Fire​Every 10 seconds the missile will be fired at you from the bombardment station. Find and destroy bombardment station to stop this.

Risk for RewardXP and parts earned in this mission will be lost, if your spaceship will be destroyed.

If you have never enabled hard mode - amplifiers are the items that you can use to upgrade spaceship parts. Upgrading makes the part as powerful as the part from the next tier. E,g,: upgraded generic part is like normal optimized part.

Of course, this is just a plan, just a bunch of ideas, so I don’t really know how will this look in the end! But I hope as cool as I imagine it now!

Next week I will continue improving inventory and items.

I will make amplifiers stack-able, I will make amplifiers for properties that don’t have amplifiers yet, I will merge apocalypse/carrier/goliath/nomad ability unleash chances into universal ability unleash chance, I will improve tooltips and maybe I will even start working on the modified enemies. (Does anyone remember sniper veterans?) After all that, I will be ready to work on the modular difficulty system!

Core of the game is done, Sector Six will no longer drastically change.Almost all upcoming updates will be content updates!

Get ready to fight the Machines, get ready to make game ten times harder, get ready to craft quad weapons, get ready to master goliath and nomad classes, get ready to enter mysterious regions outside borders through the Router...

Sustained Barrage was inspired by Hearthstone's forbidden spells. I really liked how they work, so I wanted to have something like that in Sector Six. For every 5 ether player has, Sustained Barrage releases seeking missile. If Sustained Barrage is unleashed, player spaceship will start releasing one seeking missile every three seconds, for no ether cost and that will last until the end of the mission. I'm really proud of Sustained Barrage and I hope players will like use it.

Mine Mayhem instantly fills screen with mines! While Mine Mayhem is active, detonated mines will release from one to three smaller mines, that doesn't need to be detonated.

Heavy Shield is second shielding ability in game, I'm planning to make two more in future. Heavy Shield stays 3 seconds longer, but has slightly higher cooldown than Unstable Shield. Heavy Shield also doesn't deal damage to enemies. Instead, Heavy Shield increases ether gained on kill while active. The only downside is that Heavy Shield reduces spaceship movement speed.

Besides new abilities, I have done few smaller things. I have relocated effect timers, increased damage of Unstable Shield ability, decreased Assemble Obelisk ability ether cost to 10, improved ability descriptions and nerfed armour gained on kill. From now on parts will give 50% less armour on kill. This was done so I can add effective repairing abilities.

That's all I've done this week, hopefully I'll have more time to work on Sector Six next week.

This week I have finished tutorial and introduction cutscene, fixed various glitches and began making stuff for Steam - cards, badges, emoticons, achievements, etc!

New tutorial has been tested by few players and it seems that players no longer get destroyed by tutorial enemies and don't get stuck in confusing interfaces.

I think that cutscene is pretty good too.It should give better understanding about the war against the Machines and player's role in it.I also made it completely skip-able, so people who won't like it, won't have to sit through it.*glares at Skyrim*

After I have finished tutorial and cutscene, game was uploaded to the Steam and now I can run it from my library! I have saw my game's store page and got a fancy Steamworks Developer badge!

​When game was in Steam system, I have implemented Steam achievements and leaderboards (It was really easy, although I don't know if it actually works yet!), made few large images for Steam cards, made many emoticons, made some logo images for Steam store and library, and so on!

Sector Six should be released on May, when it will get approved by Steam and when I will finish preparing game for the release!

Sector Six is pretty complex and there's not many games like it, so it can be really confusing for the new players.Someone even called Sector Six enigmatic! Because of all that, before releasing game on Steam, I must make new tutorial!And, good news, new tutorial is almost finished!This is third Sector Six tutorial and I think it's the best tutorial Sector Six had.It's fast, simple and gives pretty good understanding of the game.It still needs a lot of polishing and that's probably what I'll be doing next week!

Introduction cutscene

Now when you start the game, there's cutscene of the Negati Armada fighting the Machine in the Aspil region. During the battle, your spaceship is destroyed and you get the new one.That's where tutorial begins, because apparently you got spaceship you never piloted before, so you need to learn how to use it! In the cutscene you'll see the new Machine and first city in the history of Sector Six!The cutscene was hard, but fun to make, I hope players will like it.Anyway, it's still better introduction than the old one.

New enemies

In the tutorial the player has to defeat three enemies.Since I needed special enemies for the tutorial, Sector Six now has three new enemies!Two of them now appear outside the tutorial.I have also brought back swarmlings, they are as annoying as they were!

Polishing

I have also done a lot of polishing this week. Fixed few unobtainable achievements, fixed few problems with the alloy containers, made minor improvements to the enemy AI and so on!

Next week

Next week I will be polishing new enemies and tutorial, I will bring back second story mission and I will be preparing the game to be compiled with the different compiler, which should make game 100 times faster!